wordkoop

Wordkoop is a web-based platform and data standard for managing lexical resources across languages. It provides a collaborative environment for creating, curating, and sharing word entries, glossaries, and related linguistic data. The project emphasizes openness, interoperability, and community governance, aiming to balance flexibility for researchers with the needs of public-facing dictionaries and educational applications.

The core data model centers on word records that include lemma, language, part of speech, definitions, usage examples, etymology, pronunciation, frequency, morphological variants, synonyms, antonyms, and cross-references to related forms or senses. Wordkoop supports metadata about licensing, provenance, and contributor attribution, and offers export formats such as JSON-LD, CSV, and XML to facilitate reuse in dictionaries, NLP pipelines, and classroom tools. It also provides web APIs and a moderation workflow for community contributions.

Historically, Wordkoop began as an open-source initiative in 2023 by a coalition of linguists and developers seeking to streamline lexicographic collaboration. It evolved into a community-maintained project with governance guidelines, multilingual data emphasis, and a focus on reproducibility and data provenance.

In practice, Wordkoop is used by educational publishers, linguistics researchers, and language technology developers to assemble word lists, create dictionaries, and annotate linguistic data. Critics note that, despite its openness, effective use requires attention to licensing, data quality, and documentation.

See also: Wiktionary, Lexicography, Open data, Language resources.